qrasy,
yes,my myanmar's dict from their goverment says there are 4 tones in their language.But in their dict or other myanmar dict from the west,there are no words like chinese and thai,laos with one word exactly same vowel and consonant but with different tones.
So I cannot consider myanmar is a tonal language.By the way,myanmar script is from Mon which isn't burmese own invention.
ongtk, what are you trying to say?? I knew Burmese took Mon script. But there are many monosyllabic terms in Burmese. Script doen't mean language. Japanese took Kanjis but they didn't become more similar to Chinese structurally.

who said that burmese,mon,tibet are monosyllabic languages like chinese.
burmese,mon,tibet have to use a few vowel and consonant to form a word but not chinese.Chinese languages cannot form a sanskrit word easily but thai ,burmese ,english can easily to do.
Burmese and tibet are more about vowel length for different tones but unlike chinese and thai whereby we have to learn a same word formation in different tones to get different meaning for it.
In fact, Tibetan is not one language. There are many languages in 'Tibetan'. Burmese, Mon and Tibetan is not perfectly monosyllabic. But if you consider Chinese, it is also non-monosyllabic due to loans. Look at the words like Pu2Tao2 葡萄 , Luo2Bo 蘿 and you will get it polysyllabic.
Tibetan, Mon and Burmese cannot be described to be have to use polysyllabic words, since they are not mostly polysyllabic. They are more monosyllabic than are English.
Who said that Chinese languages cannot form a sanskrit word easily? It's only that Chinese don't have many sanskrit terms in their language. Many old terms, like the names of Buddhist characters are Sanskrit but ancient Chinese don't have difficulties in pronouncing them, but their pronunciation is far different from Modern Mandarin, so old terms tend to be funny things today. For example, Aleksandria was once written '烏戈山弋'.
It's invalid to assume tonal <-> no need to have length distinction. Thai has both vowel length and tone. Cantonese itself has a-aa distinction.

see here saying few of the tibetan-burma are monosyllabic at the same sense.
many tiibetan -burmese are tone languages but seems to be a secondary feature.
most of them unanalyzable polysyllables. http://thor.prohosting.com/~linguist/burmese.htm
Yes, it's true that Tibeto-Burman is not perfect tonal group and many words inside it is not monosyllabic. 'most of them are unanalyzable polysyllables'? It's many but NOT most, I think.

there are web pages saying that thai language are monosyllabic like chinese but I cannot see it is mono like chinese in a true sense
Don't be fooled with those loanwords. They are monosyllabic in the true sense, if you consider non-Sanskrit terms in the language.

The question is how many languages are mono currently? http://vny2k.net/vny2k/ChangeTheWayWeWr ... namese.htm
Thai is just like english with abc joint together to form a word.
You know that tt's confusing. Writing Vietnamese joint together is like a meaningless gameplay, but it does reduce the space a little bit.

sorry,the link will take us only to the main page.Type the address into yahoo search engine to get it.
I find it hard to believe he said chinese is not mono as well.
Chinese is still monosyllabic, but the reduplicatives and synonime-combinations make the sense that it's not.

You don't know that some sanskrit words cannot be formed like sva,tva,etc.They put it on top of each other but still a lot of confusinf things happen.There cannot be a perfectly wrtitten sanskrit/pali/prakrit text in chinese words in ancient or modern time.
However,Buddho can be sounded exatly in modern minnan baidu

How do you know that I don't know?
Those Double/Triple/quartruple consonant group is called 'clusters'.
In fact, the old Chinese (should) have a few clusters, but is far in number from other languages.

Clusters and polysyllables do not mean non-tonal. If you see Ruc and Muong you will know.

We are not talking about shangguyin which have cluster of consonants but Buddhism translation in china only started in han/sui period (zhonggu).
In sanskrit we have saj,sac,sas,cat,vas,sru,sri,sr,sya,srath,jr,gr,etc which is not possible in chinese(unless with special sign) but it is possible in Tibetan,thai,etc .
Please don't pretend to be an expect when you still have too much to learn.
Example,you didn't even study yunshu in chinese to get the words like crazy in minnan -siau which is apprear in Kangxizidian.This is a very basic book to study if you want to becaome expert.

We are not talking about shangguyin which have cluster of consonants but Buddhism translation in china only started in han/sui period (zhonggu).
Now you got me, I didn't know the age.

In sanskrit we have saj,sac,sas,cat,vas,sru,sri,sr,sya,srath,jr,gr,etc which is not possible in chinese(unless with special sign) but it is possible in Tibetan,thai,etc .
I know that Chinese never reperesented foreign names correctly.
The main problem is that Chinese are not alphabetic, since Chinese is Ideographic, the Characters were only possible to present what was avalaible in the morphology.
They can be written in Tibetan, Thai etc. so what?
Indonesian can write -c and -z and pronounce them while in the actual language they're not found.
In Indonesia we have Jawa script derived from India, so I know that they can be written in Indian.

Please don't pretend to be an expect when you still have too much to learn.
Example,you didn't even study yunshu in chinese to get the words like crazy in minnan -siau which is apprear in Kangxizidian.This is a very basic book to study if you want to becaome expert.
I really don't understand what you wrote about.

Vietnamese is just a branch of Bai Yue from 2000 years ago. It is branched in mon-Khmer because recently the King Quang Trung (Light Middle) who was from Tay Son (West Mountain) around the middle area of current Vietnam. He was pretty much with using Nom (Southern variations in both writing and speaking) which happened to be influenced from the Khmer people. People in Vietnam at that time did not like to be confused with the Chinese identity, then they started using Nom more than usual. I m sure around 200 years, the Vietnamese dialect was close Cantonese (I could say more than 50% mutually intelligible).

The historical truth is this. The indigenous Yue dwelled along the Yangtze River as well as other minority groups, which is South China today. Zhejiang has the oldest record of the Yue, 6000 years. South Chinese are genetically different from North Chinese. The indigenous Yue probably settled at the Red River Delta first from Fujian and Cantonese. Close to the Red River delta, the Au Yue (from Western Au) took over Lac Yue (Cantonese and Vietnamese today) by the King Shu Pan (Thuc Phan or An Duong Vuong, Anyang Wang) and put his capital city close Red River Delta where the heavy Yue culture was practiced. When Zhao Tuo took over Au Lac, he formed Nan Yue and moved the capital to Pan Guo (Phien Ngung.) The Indonesian can also be the Yue but they were immigrated there 5000 years ago because they by 5 to 10% shared vocab with North Vietnam. The linguists used only the nowadays vocab and traced the ancient Chinese vocab. They knew that Vietnam belonged to monKhmer, language only, not the genes. Most population from South China are genetically related to the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese are proud to be the same common ancestors with the South Chinese people, not the North Chinese.

Han Chinese merely prefers to the culture, language, and nationality, not the blood. It was how the Yue surived under the Han's invasion. If they did not claim themselves to be the Hans, they would get killed by a whole family.

The Indonesian can also be the Yue but they were immigrated there 5000 years ago because they by 5 to 10% shared vocab with North Vietnam.
I guess you know that Turks descended from East Asian, they mixed with the indigenous people where they migrated. In Southeast Asia, maybe there were Dravidians/Negros, so Indonesians could also be descendants of Yues (although very impure).

About the shared vocabs, even the Chinese/Tibetan has much to do with Indonesian. Bataks in Indonesia share some words from Altaic. Also, there are some 'shared' words from Chinese and English (although those may not be true cognates), Japanese with Mon-Khmer.
Shared without shared grammars actually means nothing.

The linguists used only the nowadays vocab and traced the ancient Chinese vocab. They knew that Vietnam belonged to monKhmer, language only, not the genes.
So how do you think they could share language? Languages can descend to non-related people but how?

Most population from South China are genetically related to the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese are proud to be the same common ancestors with the South Chinese people, not the North Chinese.
Why are they proud (or why are you proud?)? What is so special with South Chinese?

Han Chinese merely prefers to the culture, language, and nationality, not the blood. It was how the Yue surived under the Han's invasion. If they did not claim themselves to be the Hans, they would get killed by a whole family.

The same thing happened in Northeast, where 'Hans' are more similar to Manchus tham NorthCentral.
Most Hans have the same Y gene, NorthCentral, Northeast and South. It means that they have the same grand-grand...-father. (I write 'most' since the SeMu [non-East Asians] descendants hid their identity [by changing their surnames, but it's impossible to change Y genes] and claimed that they were Chinese because they are respected in Yuan age, but hated very much in the Ming Age)
If their autosomal genes are not very similar to original Chinese (I guess the North-Central but not Northeast), it means that in old time Chinese did not care who the female they married (maybe: as long as they are Mongoloids hehehe...).

Ethnic Chinese are called "Hoa" in Vietnam.
In Ming there were 500000 Chinese trevelled there. I once wondered why there are only about 1 million Hoa in Vietnam Was this due to the large outward flow?

"Africans were forced to speak English and thus lost their original language" was reasonable, but if you say "Vietnamese originally spoke Sino-Tibetan but were forced to speak Mon-Khmer" it's not very logical.

There were no reason to do that. (Were there Khmer empire ruling over North Vietnam for quite long a time?)

qrasy wrote:The Indonesian can also be the Yue but they were immigrated there 5000 years ago because they by 5 to 10% shared vocab with North Vietnam.
I guess you know that Turks descended from East Asian, they mixed with the indigenous people where they migrated. In Southeast Asia, maybe there were Dravidians/Negros, so Indonesians could also be descendants of Yues (although very impure).

About the shared vocabs, even the Chinese/Tibetan has much to do with Indonesian. Bataks in Indonesia share some words from Altaic. Also, there are some 'shared' words from Chinese and English (although those may not be true cognates), Japanese with Mon-Khmer.
Shared without shared grammars actually means nothing.

The linguists used only the nowadays vocab and traced the ancient Chinese vocab. They knew that Vietnam belonged to monKhmer, language only, not the genes.
So how do you think they could share language? Languages can descend to non-related people but how?

Most population from South China are genetically related to the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese are proud to be the same common ancestors with the South Chinese people, not the North Chinese.
Why are they proud (or why are you proud?)? What is so special with South Chinese?

there are different sharing vocabs and loan words. The South Chinese brought the Chinese as a whole to world attention in economics, cultures, and everything. The Northern did not have any popular culture except for the desire of political power and control over people.

Yeah, originally Chinese but now claim as Vietnamese. Sounds quite logical at first, but then if you see the scale of migrations of Chinese to Vietnam, which didn't seem very large, you can say that Vietnamese should be larger part of original Viet...